


his prayer was answered swiftly (or something like that)

by Anonymous



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: 5 Times, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Humor, Gen, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-28
Updated: 2018-01-28
Packaged: 2019-03-10 19:53:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13508631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Five worlds where Pengolodh's Quenta Silmarillion describes Fingon's rescue of Maedhros exactly the same way.





	his prayer was answered swiftly (or something like that)

_1\. Thus Fingon found what he sought_

“I—this—everyone gets lost,” Fingon says, desperately trying not to panic.

Maedhros is silent a while before he answers; it’s impossible to make out his expression through the thick dark fog. “Shoot me while you’re here?” he says, sounding for all the world like a child begging for sweets.

“What?”

“Shoot me. Please. And if you can’t get out, turn your knife on yourself.”

Fingon tells himself he’ll panic later and draws his bow, but he can’t bring himself to shoot. He falls to his knees and prays and just moving his vantage point a few feet matters a lot in the fog. There’s a path that might lead to Maedhros. He might just fall and die, or it might curve away and go somewhere else, but he sets out to try it.

Eventually, he gets within arm’s reach of Maedhros.

“You idiot,” Maedhros hisses. “That was a waste of time, you still can’t unlock this shackle, please just kill me and get out of here.”

Fingon doesn’t do that.

In the end, days later, when he carries Maedhros in the gate of the fort at Mithrim, someone asks how the hell he got back out of Angband and got Maedhros home. Fingon mutters something sarcastic about an eagle of Manwe and wanders off to get some rest.

 

_2\. Still the kingship would rightly come to you_

Fingon draws but doesn’t loose an arrow. The creature disappears into the foliage before he can get a good look at it, but the color of its furless flesh and the length of its limbs make him think that maybe, maybe…

“…Hello?” he tries in the tongue of this continent, slowly relaxing his bow without shooting.

There’s no response. He wonders if he’s being set up for an ambush, distracted by this bait.

“If you’re an elf, I don’t want to hurt you.”

A laugh, or maybe a sob. If that’s an elf, that’s an elf who’s been screaming too much lately.

“Don’t you know not to trust the enemy’s thralls?” says the stranger. He is an elf. His voice is so hoarse Fingon wonders if it hurts him to talk.

“At the very least, I can give you something to eat and some company, even if I can’t take you home with me.”

After a while, the stranger crawls out of the bushes. It’s clear why he doesn’t walk; his legs have both been broken multiple times and healed bent and twisted. His back is raw as if someone ran sandpaper over the skin, and then the muscle, and in some places the bone. He’s missing a hand and has improvised a tourniquet from things he found out in the wild. One of his ears has been bitten off; the other is missing just the tip.

He looks up and his eyes are the eyes of someone from Valinor.

“Russandol?”

He smiles in a grim mockery of mirth. “You said… some food, before you go?”

“I’m not leaving you out here for the orcs to find.”

“Might have orders not to hurt me.”

“Or maybe you’re free and I can’t just abandon you.”

“You—” Maedhros doesn’t finish that thought.

There’s a sound behind Fingon; he turns, sees orcs. They’re too close, he let them get too close. He shoots two, considers drawing his sword, notices them watching Maedhros. Worse things might happen than both of them dying here. He drops his bow, grabs Maedhros by his matted filthy hair, lifts his head up, draws his knife. There are worse things than death, there are worse things for their people than the two of them dying, Fingon knows, but he freezes, knife in hand. The orcs approach.

“Please,” says Maedhros.

Fingon, focused entirely on the orcs and Maedhros, doesn’t notice the eagle until it crushes two orc skulls in its talons at once and the last orc runs in terror.

“Hello,” he says, not sure what else to say or do.

“Need a lift?” asks the eagle.

“That might be a good idea,” Fingon says slowly, still failing to think much about the eagle when clearly he needs to be thinking about the orcs and Maedhros and threats that might suddenly appear.

“You were going to…” Maedhros says. He doesn’t finish that sentence and Fingon waits and the eagle gets impatient. Fingon carefully relaxes his grip and Maedhros doesn’t fall over so he lets go.

“I… was.”

“And now?”

“I won’t.”

“Please don’t just leave me. Please.”

“I’m taking you back with me. On this eagle. Uh. If the eagle wants to carry both of us.”

The eagle nods its head. “Of course. It’s what I came here for.”

“You can’t—I don’t want to hurt everyone, at best I’ll be a burden on them, there’s nothing you can gain by bringing one of the enemy’s thralls back into your camp…”

“Do you really not understand why I want you back?” Fingon says, and it comes out plaintive even though he would really like to believe Maedhros is just being self-pitying.

“You can’t afford to be… sentimental about me, I’m not who you used to know, I can’t help and might hurt—”

“No,” says Fingon, and since being nice isn’t working he changes tactics. “That’s not it at all. It’s what you’ll tell your brothers, but it’s not true. I’m taking you back with me. We’ll help you heal. We’ll get you back on your feet so then it will mean something when you kneel to my father. Understood?”

“Oh.” Maedhros smiles. “Yes. I can do that. I need help getting on this eagle.”

Fingon simply picks him up and puts him on the eagle’s back, then mounts.

“You’ll be careful, right?” Maedhros asks. “I could hurt you.”

Fingon laughs. “You left us to die. Somehow I think I can find it in my heart not to trust you.”

“That’s good,” he says as the eagle takes off. “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”

 

_3\. And feigning to give them liberty sent them abroad_

“Because it would serve my purposes very well for him to be free,” says Gorthaur the Cruel.

“I. Really?”

“Don’t you trust me?”

“Why do you want him free?”

“It’s not like you’d believe me if I told you. Go on, then. Take him.”

“How am I supposed to explain this? My father will have him killed.”

“Are you asking me for advice?”

“Not really, no.”

“Personally, I find that blatant lies work very well. And sometimes torture. And shapeshifting.”

“Uh-huh. Thanks.”

“You’re quite welcome! I hope you enjoy him. I sure did.”

 

_4\. His voice rang in the mournful hollows_

It’s not exactly like waking up. It’s more like one of those mornings where you don’t quite notice yourself waking and suddenly you notice you’re lying in bed awake without remembering either a dream or anything you might’ve been thinking or doing a moment ago. Fingon is watching where they’re going and applying pressure to the severed blood vessels and then he notices that he doesn’t actually remember mounting an eagle. Maybe he’s dreaming. He tries to remember what happened to get him here and flinches away from the memories.

“…Finno?” Maedhros asks. “How’d you get here? What happened?”

“I, uh,” he says. He fights past the instinctive flinch and tries to remember and the memory of everything since he got into Angband is—vague is the wrong word. Clear but not like anything. Like it’s all a color he’s never seen before, except that it’s nothing so normal as a color. The feeling the memory calls to mind is to a sense of unease as a broken bone is to a bruise. “I have no idea,” he says. “Any guesses?”

“If I think about it…”

“If you think about it?” Fingon prompts when he doesn’t finish.

“I don’t want to know what happens if I think about it.”

“People will make guesses.”

“I don’t want to hear them.”

“I’ll make sure you don’t have to.”

 

_5\. Recovered from his torment and became hale_

Maedhros sits with his back to the wall, silently telling himself stories about places gentler than Angband but less quietly corrosive than Valinor. The cell is dark and lonely; he has occasional conversations with the orcs who bring him food, or with Thauron who calls himself Mairon, and he suspects the goal is for him to come to treasure their company as the only relief he gets from the loneliness and boredom. It’s partly working—he doesn’t know what to do with this new fondness for Thauron, but every visit it gets harder and harder not to offer to work for him somehow if that’s what it takes to be allowed to spend more time with him and not alone in the dark with only his own thoughts for company. Some part of him keeps suggesting that it wouldn’t really be that bad for the Noldor if he offered to sweep Thauron’s floors or clean his clothes. He doesn’t offer. He will never help them. Unless playing board games helps, unless that gives some insight into how elves make decisions. Unless joking with him helps, gives some insight into the connections elves make between different ideas. Maybe he is a traitor already, maybe he’s crossed that line…

The door opens and there’s light, though only very dim light. There’s an orc with food. He can’t force his way past her and run; one of his wrists is shackled to the wall. She sets the food down and as always she asks him if he’d like to hear what terrible things (she claims) they’ve done to other captives lately.

Then, unlike every other visit so far, she presses a small sharp blade into his hand and says nothing about it and when he tells her, as always, that he’d like the short version with no gory details she tells him just a few sentences that might be lies and are upsetting enough on their own. Neither of them mention the blade. She accidentally forgets to lock the door when she leaves.

Maedhros considers his options, waits a while until there are no nearby footsteps or voices, and cuts a long strip off what he’s wearing. He takes the blade in his left hand and carefully amputates his right thumb. His maimed hand slips free of the shackle. He bandages it, ties the bandage with his left hand and his teeth, and considers what to do with his thumb for a moment before deciding that whichever orc finds it ought to enjoy it—he doesn’t begrudge them that, it’ll make them happy and it’s nice when they’re happy—and then wonders what exactly is wrong with him and whether it’s too late for him to go back to trying to fight these people.

He slips out into the hall and hurries toward where he thinks the exit is. Only once does he run into an orc; Maedhros slits his throat before he can shout for others to come, then moves on.

He finds himself on the mountainside in the middle of the night. Some winged creature blots out the moon as he starts to make his way carefully toward somewhere less exposed and less dangerous.

The bird scares him at first; he assumes it’s something of Melkor’s. Something of Morgoth’s. But no, there’s his cousin, someone who doesn’t belong here at all, someone from Valinor who belongs in a chapter of his life that has long since ended. Maedhros mounts the eagle and they fly away.

“I wasn’t sure when I arranged that whether you’d get out alive or… not. We stayed in the area just in case.”

“That might have been a bad risk.”

“You know me,” says Findekano the Valiant—if he has a Thindarin name, Maedhros doesn’t know it, only the Quenya—“I’m not afraid to die here if I have to.”

“I hear sometimes what happens to elves in Angband is worse than death,” Maedhros singsongs, repeating something he heard from an orc rather than something he knows for sure. Findekano shivers. “I don’t mean it like that. Nothing bad happened.”

Findekano laughs, a little hysterically. Maedhros considers, for a moment, trying to explain that actually he kind of likes the enemy and is maybe a little in love with Thauron. He thinks better of it almost immediately. It’s not as though he’s going to let it affect him. He’ll win them their war, he’ll personally destroy Thauron’s current body if he has to. He is absolutely certain that he will, that he isn’t that far compromised, but that certainty isn’t reassuring. It just leaves him feeling sick and hollowed out.

“Really, I’m fine, there’s nothing you need to worry about. I’m not hurt.”

“Of course,” Findekano says, very gently. “You don’t ever have to talk about it.”


End file.
